That’s not my place: The interacting effects of faultlines, subgroup size, and social competence on social loafing behaviour in work groups

Abstract

Taking a social relations approach to team diversity, we propose that faultlines—hypothetical dividing lines that split a team into relatively homogeneous subgroups—impact the team members’ propensity to exhibit social loafing behaviour. We further propose that this individual-level reaction to the faultline structure of the team can differ among team members, depending on the size of their subgroup and on their individual social competence. We tested the assumptions with a sample of real teams working on an intellective task during which social loafing behaviour was video-coded. In partial support of the hypotheses, generalized mixed models revealed that social loafing behaviour was most common for team members who were part of a team with strong faultlines, who belonged to the larger subgroup in their team, and who exhibited low levels of social competence. The results therefore highlight the benefits of taking a multilevel approach to the effects of faultlines.

Keywords:

• Faultlines
• subgroups
• social loafing
• social competence
• team diversity

Notes

1. Subsets of this sample have been analysed in previous studies (Kauffeld, 2006a; Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012; Kauffeld & Meyers, 2009). However, none of these used the focal independent and dependent variables that we employ in the current study.

2. In principal, controlling for the individual diversity attributes is warranted in the analysis. However, in the given data, controlling for the diversity attributes constituting the faultline creates major issues in the analysis. First, adding another four team-level independent variabless to the model reduces the statistical power for the team-level constructs from .60 to .34. Further, such an analysis would introduce significant co-linearity issues, as diversity faultlines are correlated with their individual measures, as visible in Table 2. Ignoring these issues, we calculated the final model involving the interactions again while controlling for the Blau indices of the four diversity dimensions. It revealed the same interactions at the same levels of significance as those reported in Table 3, Step 3.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Social Fund (ESF). Subsets of this data have been examined before (Kauffeld, 2006a; 2006b; Kauffeld & Meyers, 2009; Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012). However, the hypotheses and set of variables examined here have not previously been published.